Up (2009)
Directed by Pete Docter
Carl Fredricksen spent his entire life dreaming of exploring the globe and experiencing life to its fullest. But at age 78, life seems to have passed him by, until a twist of fate (and a persistent 8-year old Wilderness Explorer named Russell) gives him a new lease on life.
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45 films that influenced Up
What critics say influenced Up
No wonder the movie's Venezuelan-plateau destination is borrowed from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World: Carl is longing for an existence that cannot be recovered.
Drifting through lightning storms and near-collisions, they land in the high plateaus of Venezuela, the strange landscapes that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in writing "The Lost World," and find artifacts from the lost explorer Muntz.
Up’s visual scope is its own constant marvel, giving us generous helpings of imaginative wonder sprinkled with familiar bits of the pop-culture past (the opening newsreel is reminiscent of Citizen Kane, and Paradise Falls’ odd formation is taken almost directly from the 1925 silent version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World).
Directors Pete Docter (“Monsters, Inc.”) and Bob Peterson and their co-screenwriter Tom McCarthy brilliantly draw on such cinematic touchstones as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Wizard of Oz.” They’re also inspired by less likely sources such as “Fitzcarraldo,” “The Red Balloon” and Jules Verne’s “The Lost World” — not to mention Warner Bros.’ animated Road Runner and even the logo of its archrival, DreamWorks Animation.
He earns it the hard way, helping Carl drag his hovering home through the South American jungle in a fashion that pays subtle tribute to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo .
Up may be the first animated kiddie crowd-pleaser to feature dentures and an hommage to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, as old man and boy drag a house and the burden of dreams through the jungle.
Rather than give up his dreams in old age and enter assisted living, Carl—an accomplished balloon salesman in his time—ties some thousands of balloons (echoes of Herzog’s The White Diamond) to his home and makes way for Paradise Falls, South America, the wish-fulfilling journey he and Ellie never made in her lifetime.
Directors Pete Docter (“Monsters, Inc.”) and Bob Peterson and their co-screenwriter Tom McCarthy brilliantly draw on such cinematic touchstones as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Wizard of Oz.” They’re also inspired by less likely sources such as “Fitzcarraldo,” “The Red Balloon” and Jules Verne’s “The Lost World” — not to mention Warner Bros.’ animated Road Runner and even the logo of its archrival, DreamWorks Animation.
Sadly, echoing George Bailey’s stasis in It’s a Wonderful Life , events conspire to tie them to their small house in a neighbourhood that, as the film begins, is set for redevelopment by sinister men in sleek suits.
It's touching, too, and reminiscent of "It's a Wonderful Life," that they had bought and fixed up the abandoned house they once used for their pretend adventures as children.
Consider a sequence involving Carl’s house engaged in a mid-air dogfight with a giant silver airship: not only is it executed with grand flair and craftsmanship, parts actually feel inspired by some of the better aviation movies of vintage Hollywood, including William Wellman’s “Wings” and Howard Hughes’ “Hell’s Angels.”
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The exhilarating film pays tribute to Buster Keaton's The Balloonatic by way of its slapstick, and to Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle by way of its watercolor palette and traveling domicile.
But some inspiration has made Pixar's last three pictures—Bird's Ratatouille, Stanton's WALL-E and now Docter's Up—increasingly outlandish and…well, sad.
He did the soundtracks for The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and the new Star Trek, all of which combine a gift for pastiche with an unironic emotional directness.
Carl and Russell are more cartoonish humans than the ones we met in Ratatouille or The Incredibles, but they're beautifully expressive, Russell's open round face captures every excitement and vulnerability of childhood, while Carl's squashed square body evokes a man literally pushed down by life.
The film – which was written by Bob Peterson (Finding Nemo, Ratatouille) and directed by Peter Docter (Monsters, Inc.) – delivers all the things we’ve come to expect from a Pixar animated feature: gorgeous visuals, a strong story rife with moral lessons and (gasp) good character development; humor both low-brow (for the kids) and high-brow (for the grownups), with strokes of bold wit and a dash of sagely wisdom for good measure.
He did the soundtracks for The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and the new Star Trek, all of which combine a gift for pastiche with an unironic emotional directness.
While they’re great at the more touching moments, and also at scenes of awestruck wonder — like when Carl’s flying house touches down on that mountain plateau towering above the clouds — Docter and Petersen’s sense of humor can seem a bit too hokey much of the time, lacking the more inspired zaniness of, say, “The Incredibles”.
Brad Bird is the notable exception: I see his 2004 “The Incredibles” and the 2007 “Rataouille” as the real jewels in the Pixar crown.
As a feat of the imagination, it is on a par with the studio’s finest – among them, Toy Story 2 , The Incredibles and my personal favorite, WALL*E – but Up occasionally loses focus, moving in too many directions at once to concentrate on Carl and Russell’s burgeoning friendship.
And Michael Giacchino, the virtuosic composer for Pixar’s The Incredibles andand J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek and “Lost,” excels with one of his richest and most buoyant scores.Cast aside any doubts that audiences will embrace an animated feature with a septuagenarian lead.
(That touch was evident even in his early masterpiece, “The Iron Giant.” ) “Up” is hardly an offensive picture — at worst, it’s simply innocuous, and at best, it’s very, very pretty to look at.
Up’s visual scope is its own constant marvel, giving us generous helpings of imaginative wonder sprinkled with familiar bits of the pop-culture past (the opening newsreel is reminiscent of Citizen Kane, and Paradise Falls’ odd formation is taken almost directly from the 1925 silent version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World).
Look beyond the breathtakingly beautiful 3D animation and you’ll find everything from clever homages to “Citizen Kane” and “The Wizard of Oz” to characters so richly rendered they seep into your soul.
Written and directed by Pete Docter (who co-wrote WALL•E) and Bob Peterson (with some writing assistance from Tom McCarthy of The Station Agent), Up also boasts a tour-de-force opening, evoking Citizen Kane, King Kong, and The Wizard of Oz in its first five minutes alone.
Up begins in a movie theatre with newsreel footage (shades of Citizen Kane) of the fictional explorer Charles Muntz (Plummer), whose heralded career is sullied when his findings are questioned and he heads back to South America, never to be heard from again.
A series of colorful vignettes on love, fidelity, and adventure, Up is emotionally and aesthetically hieratic, conflating from its very first, Citizen Kane -referencing sequence—in which a young Carl Fredrickson (voiced by Edward Asner), eyes agog, watches a black-and-white newsreel celebrating the rise and fall of famed explorer and personal hero Charles Muntz—the act of watching movies with the ecstasies and banalities of living.
For those who've done their time in the valley of children's literature, "Up" glances off any number of classic tales: Carl's hemmed-in cottage evokes "The Little House" of Virginia Lee Burton, for instance, and Dug the dog carries echoes of the beloved Tock of "The Phantom Tollbooth."
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The eviction is what gets the surface story going, as the old man, Carl Fredrickson, voiced by Ed Asner, grumpy sounding, and animated to look like a mix of Kirk Douglas and his square chin and raisin nose, and John Huston with his unsettling gravely voice, specifically his creepy performance in Chinatown , finds a way to airlift his house with balloons to go on the trip to South America he'd always promised his patient, and now dead wife that they'd go on.
Codirectors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson (who also voices the role of the friendly talking dog, Dug) borrowed the film's centerpiece image of a floating edifice from Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, but we could forgive them if Up had even a fraction of that 2004 animated fantasy's sense of enchantment.
In that respect Up recalls the anime Howl's Moving Castle by Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki.
It also helps that the film has one of the Studio’s best English dubs, with none other than Christian Bale voicing Howl, Emily Mortimer and Jean Simmons as the young and old versions of Sophie, a young, pre-Terabithia Josh Hutcherson as Markl, and a lively Billy Crystal as Calcifer that rivals his turn as Mike in the Monsters Inc. movies (not coincidentally, the dub was managed by PIXAR’s own Pete Doctor, who directed Monsters Inc. and Up).
A more daring animator – Japan's great Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away"), for example – might have brought out the frights and the madness.
Lasseter's a longtime Miyazaki fan whose legacy includes bringing the director's work to America (Disney will release "Ponyo" in August), and when this movie debuted at Cannes this month, Lasseter affirmed that "Miyazaki is in all the Pixar films."